Although many Spanish historians have painted Moorish Spain as something other than paradise for Jews and Christians, for Muslims it remains not only a symbol of vanished greatness but a kind of alternative vision of Islam-one in which all the ills of present-day Islamic societies are reversed. Muslim tourists, including many heads of state, come to Spain to imagine a time when Islam was at the center of art and learning, not on the fringes. "The Alhambra is the number one Islamic monument," Malik A. Ruiz Callejas, the emir of the Islamic community in Spain and the president of Granada's new mosque, told me recently. "Back when in Paris and London people were being eaten alive by rats, in Cordoba everyone could read and write. The civilization of Al Andalus was probably the most just, most unified, and most tolerant in history, providing the greatest level of security and the highest standard of living."
Imams sometimes invoke the glory of Al Andalus in Friday prayers as a reminder of the price that Muslims paid for turning away from the true faith. When I asked Moneir el-Messery, of the M-30 mosque, if the Madrid bombers could have been motivated by the desire to recapture Al Andalus, he looked up sharply and said, "I can speak of the feeling of all Muslims. It was a part of history. We were here for eight centuries. You can't forget it, ever."
The fear that the "Moors" would one day return and reclaim their lost paradise-through either conquest or immigration-has created a certain paranoia in Spanish politics. Construction of the mosque in Granada was delayed for twenty-two years because of the intense anxiety surrounding the growing Islamic presence. In 1986, Spain joined the European Union; generous EU subsidies ignited an economic boom, drawing thousands of young men from North Africa. "The Muslims are young, and male, and they come by themselves," Mohammed el-Afifi, the director of press relations at the M-30 mosque, told me two years ago, when I visited him. "They don't speak Spanish, and they don't have much information about Spain. And they arrive with a different religion." At the time, Afifi placed the number of Arab immigrants in Spain at three hundred thousand. Now the number of Arabic-speaking immigrants is five hundred thousand, not including half a million illegals. The
Spanish government has encouraged official immigration from South America at the expense of North Africa, but smugglers in high-speed power boats make nightly drop-offs on the ragged Spanish coastline, and the frequent discovery of corpses washing up on the beaches testifies to the desperation of those who did not quite get to shore.
Muslim immigration is transforming all of Europe. Nearly twenty million people in the European Union identify themselves as Muslim. This population is disproportionately young, male, and unemployed. The societies these men have left are typically poor, religious, conservative, and dictatorial; the ones they enter are rich, secular, liberal, and free. For many, the exchange is invigorating, but for others Europe becomes a prison of alienation. A Muslim's experience of immigration can be explained in part by how he views his adopted homeland. Islamic thought broadly divides civilization into dar al-Islam, the land of the believers, and dar al-Kufr, the land of impiety.
France, for instance, is a secular country, largely Catholic, but it is now home to five million Muslims. Should it therefore be considered part of the Islamic world? This question is central to the debate about whether Muslims in Europe can integrate into their new communities or must stand apart from them. If France can be considered part of dar al-lslam, then Muslims can form alliances and participate in politics; they should have the right to institute Islamic law, and they can send their children to French schools. If it is a part of dar al-Kufr, then strict Muslims must not only keep their distance;
they must fight against their adopted country.
The Internet provides confused young Muslims in Europe with a virtual community. Those who cannot adapt to their new homes discover on the Internet a responsive and compassionate forum. "The Internet stands in for the idea of the ummah, the mytholo-gized Muslim community," Marc Sageman, the psychiatrist and former CIA officer, said. "The Internet makes this ideal community concrete, because one can interact with it." He compares this virtual ummah to romantic conceptions of nationhood, which inspire people not only to love their country but to die for it.
"The Internet is the key issue," Gilles Kepel, a prominent Arabist and a professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, in Paris, told me recently. "It erases the frontiers between the dar al-lslam and the dar al-Kufr. It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an Internet Sharia and fatwa system." Kepel was speaking of the Islamic legal code, which is administered by the clergy. Now one doesn't have to be in Saudi Arabia or Egypt to live under the rule of Islamic law. "Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca," Kepel said. "In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site."
To a large extent, Kepel argues, the Internet has replaced the Arabic satellite channels as a conduit of information and communication. "One can say that this war against the West started on television," he said, "but, for instance, with the decapitation of the poor hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, those images were propagated via Webcams and the Internet. A jihadi subculture has been created that didn't exist before 9/11."
Because the Internet is anonymous, Islamist dissidents are less susceptible to government pressure. "There is no signature," Kepel said. "To some of us who have been trained as classicists, the cyber-world appears very much like the time before Gutenberg. Copyists used to add their own notes into a text, so you never know who was the real author."
Gabriel Weimann, a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, has been monitoring terrorist Web sites for seven years. "When we started, there were only twelve sites," he told me. "Now there are more than four thousand." Every known terrorist group maintains more than one Web site, and often the sites are in different languages. "You can download music, videos, donate money, receive training," Weimann said. "It's a virtual training camp." There are two online magazines associated with Al Qaeda, Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Jihad) and Muaskar al-Battar (Camp al-Battar), which feature how-to articles on kidnapping, poisoning, and murdering hostages. Specific targets, such as the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, or FedWire, the money-clearing system operated by the Federal Reserve Board, are openly discussed. "We do see a rising focus on the U.S.," Weimann told me. "But some of this talk may be fake-a scare campaign."
One of the sites has been linked directly to terrorist acts. An editor of Sawt al-Jihad, Issa bin Saad al-Oshan, died in a gun battle with Saudi police on July 21, during a raid on a villa in Riyadh, where the head of Paul M. Johnson, Jr., the American hostage, was discovered in the freezer.
The importance of the Internet in the case of Madrid is disputed among experts. "Yes, the Internet has created a virtual ummah," Olivier Roy, an expert on political Islam at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, wrote to me recently. "The Web sites seem to attract the lonely Muslim cybernaut, who does remain in a virtual world. But Madrid's bombers used the Internet as a tool of communication. Their leaders had personal links with other Al Qaeda members, not virtual ones."
Thomas Hegghammer, the Norwegian investigator, divides the jihadi Internet community into three categories. "First, you have the message boards," he explained in a recent e-mail. "There you find the political and religious discussions among the sympathizers and potential recruits. The most important message boards for Al Qaeda sympathizers are Al Qal'ah (The Fortress), Al Sahat (The Fields), and Al Islah (Reform)." These boards, Hegghammer wrote, provide links to the "information hubs," where new radical-Islamist texts, declarations, and recordings are posted. "You often find these among the 'communities' at Yahoo, Lycos, and so on," Hegghammer continued. "There are many such sites, but the main one is Global Islamic Media." It was at this site that Hegghammer discovered the "Jihadi Iraq" document. "Finally, you have the 'mother sites,' which are run by people who get their material directly from the ideologues or operatives. They must not be confused with the myriad amateur sites (usually in English) set up by random sympathizers or bored kids."